Nazifa Rahman is a 19-year-old student from the Bronx. Born and raised in New York, she's majoring in neuroscience and behavior at Barnard College, and her favorite reads include The Great Gatsby and Jane Eyre. In the eyes of the NYPD, however, Nazifa is a target for surveillance, because she is a member of the Columbia Muslim Students Association.

"Even my father has told me to keep a low profile," says Nazifa, speaking of the time when the association found out that its website was being monitored by an NYPD officer. "But nothing has changed and we just continued being who we are."

The group of eight Muslims from New Jersey claim that the surveillance program is unconstitutional because it is carried out without any particular investigative leads; instead, an entire community is singled out as suspicious. Suspects are singled out simply because of their religious affiliation, race or nationality.

Methods used by the NYPD's Demographics Unit to identify targets include "countries of interest", "religious institutions and congregations" and "specific ethnicities". Houses of worship, religious schools and community centers are listed as "key indicators" alongside criminal activity and extremist paraphernalia and literature.

The New Jersey group is being represented pro bono in the case by the Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization created in 2005 as a sister entity to the National Association of Muslim Lawyers.

According to Muslim Advocates legal director Glenn Katon, the main purpose of the lawsuit is to bring the surveillance program to a halt and force the NYPD to "destroy all the data that has been collected in an unconstitutional manner".

He said: "We have some businesses [in New Jersey] included in the NYPD report who have seen a decline in customers and business since the surveillance story surfaced." People feel they can no longer discuss certain subjects in a candid manner for fear of being watched, he added.

"People say to the imam that they don't feel comfortable coming to the mosque anymore. They have seen a decline in people coming to pray. You never know when there's going to be an infiltrated NYPD officer coming to your mosque or your student association."

In response to the lawsuit, NYPD deputy commissioner Paul J Browne said in a statement to the Guardian: "NYPD activities in New Jersey were lawful, appropriate, and in keeping with efforts there, in New York, and around the world to prevent terrorists from returning here to kill more New Yorkers."

Despite a number of protests against the years-long surveillance program, and more specifically against the NYPD's practice of conducting some investigations outside New York, New Jersey's attorney general Jeffrey Chiesa gave the program a clean bill of health. Chiesa stopped short of praising the close monitoring of Muslim institutions, but declared that the NYPD's conduct was "permissible". Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, has angrily condemned the spying program.

The New Jersey lawsuit is the first to question the methods used by the NYPD to monitor the Muslim community in the northeast since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and other similar cases should be presented to the US supreme court this year. The American Civil Liberties Union is preparing to file its own federal lawsuit denouncing religious-based surveillance by the NYPD.

Hina Shamsi, ACLU's national security project director, said: "The AP news story and the documents they are based on show that NYPD was engaging on secret surveillance of innocent people based on the crudest religious profiling.

"The NYPD imposed a badge of stigma and suspicion on all Muslims by engaging on surveillance of all Muslim civilians."

Shamsi said the program is not only unconstitutional, but also a waste of law enforcement resources that could be channelled to more effective and less harmful projects. The worst part, she said, is the growing feeling of discrimination among Muslim citizens in the region. "There's a huge concern about retaliation and fear in the community; people fear being singled out and stigmatized."

For Nazifa and her fellow students at the Columbia Muslim association, the solution began with organizing a human rights workshop open to every student on campus. The basic idea was to make clear to people that such misdemeanor cannot be tolerated – even if the violator of your rights happens to be the state.